


Loyalty

by Josselin



Series: Loyalty and Forgiveness [1]
Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: F/M, Jokaste tries to get pregnant without her lover's consent, manipulated birth control, tricked impregnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-13 15:41:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14751671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Josselin/pseuds/Josselin
Summary: It wasn’t polite to correct the King.





	Loyalty

**Author's Note:**

> For the [Captive Prince 10 Year Anniversary Celebration](http://josselinkohl.tumblr.com/post/173974155357/capri-month-this-year-captive-prince-turns-10).
> 
> Thank you to [Punk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Punk) for beta!

It wasn’t polite to correct the King. 

Jokaste was high enough born that when she arrived in Ios she merited an introduction. The King and his sons didn’t wait in the courtyard on her riding through the gates, but she was greeted by the daughter of the Kyros of Ios and given time to refresh herself and introduced to the King and the Princes at the evening meal. 

King Theomedes said something polite about her parents, and she responded that they were well. Then he complimented her appearance, and she lowered her eyes and thanked him for his kindness. Then, he said, “You must be of an age with my son.”

Jokaste was thinking of his older son, who had indeed been born in the same season she had, and she said, “Yes.”

But it became clear the King was mistaken, for he said, “Let me introduce you to Damianos,” and presented her with his younger son.

She and Damianos were not the same age. She had been old enough to remember his birth well. Jokaste had been ten, and stories of Queen Egeria’s pregnancy and then her tragic death in childbirth had captured the discussion of noble ladies throughout the kingdom for months. 

But it wasn’t polite to correct the King, and it was a flattering mistake, Jokaste supposed, so she merely said, “Exalted,” and allowed the Crown Prince to kiss the back of her hand in introduction. His fingers were warm on her palm, and his eyes were deep and attractive when he met hers, but she drew her hand away from him coolly. She was old enough to know something of how courting worked. 

She was widely traveled. Because she and her mother did not always get along, it was easier to take advantage of others’ hospitality than to stay in her father’s keep and listen to her mother’s criticisms about how she ought to have accepted any of a half dozen marriage offers she’d received years before. Jokaste liked to travel, and to see new places, and to meet new people--to meet new men, particularly--and she found the routine of her father’s keep dull and monotonous. She had been to Patras for several seasons, and throughout Sicyon, and to Delpha close to the border of Vere. She had been to the capital once before, as a child, and remembered the white cliffs and the sound of the ocean and the grandeur of the stone palace.

Jokaste had come to the capital in particular this season because she had heard that Tassos was also visiting. Tassos was the Kyros of Kesus, and he had been widowed a year prior, and Jokaste had been given to understand that he was in search of a second wife. She had met Tassos before previously in Sicyon, and had a favorable impression of the man. He wasn’t the kind of man that she would have married at eighteen or twenty-two. He was quiet and attentive to his work and did not seem to have any grander ambitions than to honor his King as a loyal Kyros in Kesus. But now she thought of other things, also. He was wealthy and Kesus was prosperous. He had been indulgent of his first wife, and had given her significant freedom to travel, often by herself. He already had a child and might not grieve if he did not have more. These things were also of interest to Jokaste, and so she had been thinking about how to see Tassos again. To place herself in front of him now that he was available and thinking of marrying a second time, and to see if he might look her way.

Jokaste was seated next to the Crown Prince Damianos at dinner, so she took advantage of the Prince’s attentive conversational efforts to further her plan, asking who else was visiting Ios at the same time that she was, and then asking questions about several of the visitors the Prince mentioned to disguise her particular attention to Tassos. The meal concluded, and Damianos showed no signs of wishing to leave her side, so she enlisted his assistance further, and suggested that it would be beneath him to introduce her to several of the other guests who were visiting at the same time.

She had noticed, during the meal, that the Crown Prince was arrogant, she supposed in the way a prince might always be arrogant, but he was clever enough to understand her suggestion even though it was framed as the opposite, and immediately offered to make introductions. 

It was convenient having a prince make her introduction, because of course Tassos had to speak with them. He couldn’t decline his Prince’s invitation to meet the latest visitor to the palace, though Jokaste flattered herself that she didn’t think Tassos wanted to decline in any case. She offered her hand to Tassos the way she had to the Prince earlier, and he also kissed the back of it. His lips were cooler than the Prince’s and his beard brushed the back of her hand. She let her hand linger for a moment, and then withdrew it. “My lord,” she said to him, and offered condolences on the loss of his wife. 

Tassos had a pained expression that suggested he had been genuinely attached to his wife, and accepted her condolences. 

Damianos placed a hand on Jokaste’s back. “Let me also introduce you to Isidore,” he said, exerting a gentle pressure to guide her toward the other side of the room, and Jokaste murmured a farewell to Tassos and let the Prince lead her to speak with a visiting poet from Mellos. 

Jokaste was somewhat embarrassed, later, that it took her several days to realize that the Crown Prince was serious about his attentions. He had shown her around at dinner the first evening, of course. His attentiveness might have only been his father instructing him to be polite, or him demonstrating the good manners of one raised in the court. The second day of her visit he’d invited her to walk with him in the orchard, where the fruit trees were in bloom and the air was fragrant and when the wind blew there was a shower of tiny white petals falling down through the air and covering the path. She hadn’t thought much about this at the time, her thoughts occupied with the encounter she’d had with Tassos that morning. 

On the third day of her visit, Damianos asked her if she liked music, and when she agreed that she did, invited her to listen to a particularly skilled singer. She sat next to him during the performance, and thought to herself--is he flirting with me?--and forced herself to pay attention in a new way. During the second half of the performance she noticed his eyes follow a slave around the room and him laugh charmingly at a joke told by another of the ladies in attendance. She answered her own question. No. He flirted with everyone; it was an example of his good nature. She was pleased that she had made no fuss over his attentions; she hated looking foolish in that manner.

The fourth day of her visit there was a sporting competition, and she watched the princes and many of the other men compete. Damianos met her eyes from the side of the ring before he took stepped onto the field, and there was something in his smile that made her think, “He is favoring me.” But then she saw how Damianos’s eyes rested on the muscled soldier who won the archery competition. He flirted with everyone, she told herself again. His current gaze on the soldier’s chest seemed to indicate he might even prefer men. 

She tipped her cup out over a bush, almost emptying it, and then made her way over toward where Tassos was seated, so that she could finish her beverage next to him and he might offer to refill it for her. 

Tassos was not competing in the events. He was too old for that, he said, though there were older men who were still on the field, and Jokaste was certain that Tassos was no more than forty-five. She admired his fitness, though, for a man who declined sports, and he expressed a fondness for riding.

“We must go together sometime,” she said.

Tassos’s eyes moved over her body. “Perhaps soon.”

“I look forward to it,” she said.

The fifth day of her visit, there was a dance in the hall. Jokaste spent the afternoon with her servant Phoebe, instructing her on how to pin and curl and oil her hair, and closing her eyes while Phoebe put kohl on her face. In the evening, the hall was lit with torches, and the tables had been pushed aside by the servants. The King and his family had been moved to one side of the dais and musicians had been stationed on the other side, playing traditional tunes. 

At first there were the dances that everyone knew, and that Jokaste had learned many years prior. The King and his mistress joined a dance where many of them stood in a circle and stepped to the left three times, and then the right twice, and then clapped, and then reversed the pattern. The circle became larger as more and more dancers joined in, and then a second circle formed near to the first, and they moved in opposite directions. As the light grew dimmer and the drink flowed stronger, individual dancers or pairs would step inside of the circle, to call out instructions for a particular dance, or to show off by twirling or stepping faster or shouting. 

The dances became more complicated and less familiar, more specific to Ios. Some of the older dancers sat down and enjoyed watching and their drinks instead of stepping in the circle. There was a complicated series of steps that Jokaste needed another woman to show her twice before she could keep up with one of the songs, and every time the chorus recurred the musicians and the dancers all began to do it faster, until the circle collapsed since everyone was laughing and colliding with each other and unable to keep pace with the music. Jokaste was not fond of dances she did not know, but there was no point in saying so, and she only smiled and tried to approach learning them with good humor.

The circles reformed, and some of the musicians exchanged places with new musicians, and the dancing began again. Jokaste thought about dodging out of the circle as it formed again, but the Crown Prince emerged next to her and took her hand, drawing her back into the circle as it formed. When he took a place next to her, it meant that they clasped hands during the dances, and that when she stepped in the wrong direction she ended up pressed against his chest. His smile was warm, and he caught her with a hand on her shoulder. 

Jokaste stepped away from him, and began to move in rhythm once again. Damianos drew his hand out of hers, and then he stepped into the middle of the circle to show off. He was as good of a dancer as his swordsmanship in the competitions the day before would suggest. The circle was encouraging to him, also, clapping and shouting suggestions, because he was their prince, and also because he was congenial and most people in Ios seemed genuinely fond of him.

Then he came to the edge of the circle, and she thought that he was giving up his time in the center and going to yield to another dancer, but instead he took her hands and tugged her into the center of the circle with him.

Jokaste followed, laughing lightly to hide her chagrin. She liked attention and men’s eyes on her, but not when she was doing a dance where she did not know the steps and felt foolish. There was no way to escape gracefully, however, and she let Damianos show her the steps and lead her. Then he tugged her body closer to his, and wrapped and arm around her waist instead of holding her hands, and that was easier, because dancing when pressed together was less about steps and turning and clapping than it was knowing how to move with the body against yours. She felt much more competent at that.

She reevaluated her assessment of Damianos’s behavior, for he might have pulled her to dance with him as a gesture of excitement or of politeness to a guest, but he would not have danced out of politeness like that, angling their hips together. They danced for a few minutes, and then Damianos moved them to the edge of the circle again, and dodged between other dancers to leave them on the side of the hall. He was holding her hand and both of them were breathing a bit heavily from the dancing and his hair was tousled. 

“Come with me out on the balcony,” he said earnestly.

Jokaste still felt as though she were mentally rearranging all of her warnings to herself about how the Prince was not interested.

“Yes,” she said, after a pause, and Damianos smiled and then turned and led her by the hand out of the hall on to one of the sheltered balconies overlooking the palace garden. 

It was quieter, a few steps and a stone wall away from the hall and the music and the shouting, and the air was cooler away from the torches and all of the people. The balcony was open to the night breeze from the cliffs.

She was trying to plan, quickly. What might he say, now that they were alone? What would be her response? Were there things she wished to say to him? That she ought to say to him? This was an opportunity that she felt inadequately prepared for.

She decided to let him speak first, so she leaned against the balcony railing, met his eyes, and felt the breeze ruffle her hair. 

He smiled at her again. He had a beautiful smile. 

She waited, but instead of speaking, he took a step closer to her, leaned in, and kissed her. 

Jokaste met his lips eagerly. She tilted her head up, because he had to bend down to kiss her, and she stepped in closer to him. His body was warm. He smelled of the ale they had been drinking during the dancing, and of sweat.

He wrapped an arm around her back again, the way he had when they had been dancing, and kissed her again. She parted her lips, wondering if he would take the opportunity, and he did, deepening the kiss. 

She had not previously given much thought to what he would be like, as a lover, because she had not seriously considered him as a partner, and then when she had questioned his behavior briefly she had dismissed his interest yet again. She realized now that if she had thought of it, she would have expected him to want to be led. Perhaps because he was young, or because he had the kind of nature where he wished to please. The way he asserted himself surprised her, somehow. That he had drawn her onto the dance floor and pulled her away to the balcony and kissed her instead of speaking.

Their kiss grew more passionate, as she leaned in and pressed teasingly against him for a moment before drawing slightly away to catch her breath. 

“You’ve very beautiful,” he said. 

She continued meeting his eyes. “Thank you, Exalted.”

He offered his small name. “You can call me Damen.”

“Damen,” she tried it out.

“I’d like to walk you to your room,” he said.

“You may walk me to my door,” she said, emphasizing the word door. 

To his credit, he seemed just as excited about the prospect of escorting her to her door as he might have been if she had indicated she would invite him inside, and he held her hand gently as they made their way through the palace to the room she’d been assigned by the palace steward. 

He kissed her again in her doorway, but chastely, and then he stepped away, and smiled, said goodnight, and retreated down the hallway. 

Jokaste watched him walk away, and then entered her own room, closed the door behind her, and leaned for a moment against the stone wall. The marble was cool against her skin. The Crown Prince, she thought to herself. The Crown Prince.

She didn’t sleep much. She had been up late already, with the dancing, and after Phoebe unpinned her hair and she wiped the kohl off her face her heart was still beating too quickly for her to slip into sleep. She sat next to the window in her room, for a while, feeling the night air, and then relaxed under a fine linen sheet on the bed, and she tried to keep her mind from racing too far ahead of herself. 

It was difficult. Turned to a new frontier, her mind was like a general conquering it with no restraint. She thought of things she might say to Damianos the following day, of flirtatious looks she might give him. She planned how to use his small name in conversation suggestively.

She remembered how he looked while he was dancing, and the strength of his body when he had pressed against her, and she enjoyed the feeling of pleasure that these thoughts brought her. 

She did not want to think further than that, but she could not stop herself. She thought of how rapidly a courtship might proceed. Several months would be fast, for a prince who was courting for pleasure and not making an arranged marriage, but still seemly--it was possible that they might be married in the fall. She wondered what a royal wedding in Ios looked like, picturing the palace decorated with greenery and all of the court wearing their finest linen. She thought of what kind of headdress she might wear for the wedding, and with her next thought hoped that their first child together would be a boy. A boy and then a girl, she thought, as though these were things where thinking about them made any difference, and she was picturing the palace again in a state of celebration, this time ringing the bells to announce the birth of a new prince. 

She slept fitfully, thinking of all of these thoughts, and she woke in the morning to question half of what she had thought the night before. She was not even certain that she liked the Prince that much--he was charismatic, and attractive, but he seemed too honest, in a way. Too good. Would he ever be able to know her? Did she care? She had not been thinking of marriage with Tassos imagining that they would have a deep companionship, simply an amiable arrangement with lifestyles they each enjoyed. Was it any less practical to think of that with the Prince?

Then she lectured herself for being foolish again, and told herself that she did not even have any arrangements to see him again. He had not invited her to any future events. He might have been motivated the night before only by the drink and the dancing and the heat of the moment, and when she had declined to invite him into her bedroom perhaps he had gone off to sleep to think no more of it. 

Should she not have declined to invite him, she wondered. It had seemed the right action at the time, to tell him that she was not going to be easily attained and that he would need to chase her, but perhaps she should have let him in and impressed him instead with how she could make him feel in bed.

She dressed to go riding, and enjoyed the spring air with Tassos. When they returned to the palace, Tassos offered her a hand to dismount her horse, and she accepted. His fingers lingered after she was on the ground, and she thought he was about to invite her to repeat the experience when she heard her name. 

She and Tassos both turned to see Damianos approaching. His face was full of enthusiasm to see her again. Tassos let go of her hand. 

Tassos and Damianos exchanged greetings while Damianos hardly took his eyes off of her. He offered some invitation--she wasn’t even certain what, later--and she accepted, saying farewell to Tassos and leaving him in the stables as she followed the Prince. 

Tassos’s eyes were knowing, as she said farewell. He was not a man who would compete with his Prince, she knew. He had declined to do so on the sporting field and he would not do so in courtship. 

She spent the next few days in a haze of romantic gestures from the Prince. They walked in the garden and through the orchards and down toward the coast. The Prince showed her the town of Ios in the old city walls, and when a fruitseller gave him a peach he offered it to her and the juice dripped down her chin. She didn’t like that type of small indignity that she knew others found charming, but she liked the way Damen smiled at her and wiped her chin with his thumb. 

He introduced her to his friends, who all struck her as very young men with young men’s concerns. They were trying to prove themselves during the day and compete with each other over who could drink the most ale in the evenings, and Jokaste felt that she had never been so young even when she had been only twenty or so herself.

Conversation was hard. Jokaste tried to raise some of the questions of the court, and he brushed them aside, saying, “Oh, there is no conversation of court business permitted in the garden.” He asked sometimes about her, but there were many things she was editing out of her past, and so she did not like that as a topic of conversation. He asked of her interests, but she did not wish to speak of her true interest of courting men, so she mentioned poetry, which she enjoyed listening to and occasionally composed, and it was clear that he had no interest. He had traveled, and she liked asking him of his time in Patras or along the border, but then she would mention that she had traveled, and that led to questions such as when, and for how long, and many of these seemed too close to telling him how far apart they actually were in age, which she was inclined to hold to herself. 

She still found herself frequently awake at night, her thoughts faster than her heartbeat, and she told herself excuses about him and named their future children after her favorite mythical heroes from the stories she’d heard as a child. He was young, she told herself, but he would not always be so. His friends were young, but they too would grow older. He was arrogant, but he was a prince. He was at leisure, and at leisure it was fine for a young man to drink ale and avoid the deliberations of the kyroi in favor of wrestling with his friends. He would take on the work of the kingdom from his father over time. 

After two weeks, she felt that she had woven a web that has captured his attention thoroughly enough that she planned to extend an invitation to her bedroom. Before she might do so, she was called on by the palace slavemaster, Adrastus.

She didn’t like Adrastus from their first meeting. He was scheming in the way that ambitious men in low places were, and she disliked the way that he looked at her. His eyes didn’t respect her position or her bearing. She glared at him when he arrived in the sitting room.

“I am here to tell you of the Prince’s preferences,” he said.

Jokaste raised an eyebrow. “That is unnecessary,” she said.

He gave her a look, the type of look that implied that he thought she had been all too free with her attentions and probably did know of the Prince’s preferences. It was a dismissive look. She disliked him more. 

“The Prince is not interested in marriage at this time,” said Adrastus. Jokaste felt cold, suddenly, and worked to keep her expression unreadable. “The Prince is also not interested in children. You are expected to take appropriate precautions.” He paused, clearly waiting for an acknowledgement. 

She nodded, after a moment. She would have anyway, and had been, from a combination of not being especially interested in children herself, and from having already planned out the birth of the new Prince as taking place after an elaborate royal wedding. She had arrived in the capital with a supply of herbs, thinking of wooing Tassos, and she had sent Phoebe to the market to increase the supply only the day before. She still felt cold. Adrastus’s words echoed in her head. “Not interested in marriage.” She wanted him to leave her sitting room. 

The slavemaster’s embarrassing and pedantic lecture finally ended, and he left. Jokaste was alone. 

She felt lost. She didn’t know how to think of her dreams of the last few days. How much credence should she put in the slavemaster’s words, anyway? Did he truly speak for the Prince? Perhaps he had spoken to her of his own initiative. Or perhaps he had been instructed to speak to each of the Prince’s lovers. His instructions might come from the King and not even from Damianos himself. Adrastus knew nothing of how Damianos looked at her when they were alone, she thought.

She did not like clinging to falsehoods, though. 

Even if it were true that the Prince were not currently thinking of marriage, she thought, that did not mean that he might not be persuaded to think of it. He was young; young men were not always appreciative of what marriage brought. Even if he had no thought of it now, that did not mean he might not turn toward a thought of it the following year, or the year after that. If she kept his interest long enough, he would eventually think of marriage; she need only be still at his side when that happened.

She extended her invitation to Damianos to join her in bed, but with less joy in her heart than she had anticipated having when she originally planned it. Something within her still felt cold from her conversation with Adrastus. She held her tongue against every third thing she thought of saying to Damianos, and every third thing that Damianos said made her think, “Oh, he is such a boy.” 

She tested him, a bit, in conversation, mentioning events in the future to see if he would take the prompts to express any of his future intentions toward her. She spoke of the fall harvest festival, wondering if he would envision the two of them attending it together, and he only said that the orchards were beautiful in that season. 

She took appropriate precautions against a child.

In bed, Damianos surprised her again. He was less of a boy in bed than she had expected from his other behavior, and proved a considerate lover and attentive to her pleasure. He had the obvious advantages of youth and vigor and strength and he did not hesitate to use them, picking her up from a chair to carry her to the bed as though she weighed nothing at all, and she thought to herself that Tassos would never have been able to do that. He was accomplished, and yet interested in stories she told of how they used silk ties in Patras or fashions of massage in Aegina. 

She continued to sleep restlessly. When he was beside her, she looked at him and marveled at how warm he was, and how content to be sleeping next to her. When he was not beside her, she stared at the timbers supporting the ceiling and dreamed of a child they might have together and then alternately dissected every statement he had said that day and ruthlessly told herself that none of the things he had said about the future had involved her. 

The only time he had mentioned marriage was a casual reference to political unions, which had mostly been a remark about the rumored alliance of Torveld of Patras with the Empire. When he spoke of the future it was about his father’s declining health, or his hopes of conquering Vere. 

She had thought that the advantage of a younger man was that he would be more open to influence, easier to shape, and yet he resisted shaping. He was stubborn, and clever. Jokaste had many years of being witty with men who rarely contradicted her, and he contradicted her often, and it surprised her that he was often right. She made a joke about plums from the orchard, and he corrected her on how plums were harvested. She gave an allusion to an old poem about the royal family settling in Ios and he objected that the poem was inaccurate. 

They seemed best suited when they were together in bed, when talking and words were unnecessary and the communication between them was just with their bodies. She asked him in bed, on their third night together, “What do you want?” Because there was always something that men wanted, and it was only a question of coaxing them to admit what it was. 

“I want to know you,” he said, sincere and wide-eyed in the darkness, and it was perhaps the only thing he could have said that left her without an answer. She had been prepared to indulge him, or to gently defer if his secret desires were not to her tastes, but she did not know how to respond to his desire to know her. She was not even certain what that meant. When she thought upon what it meant, it left her feeling uncertain. She did not want him to know her.

Several weeks passed. She was approached by various members of the court seeking favors from one close to the Prince, and she demurred, but kept a careful list of who approached her and thought of how she might handle such things as the queen.

One evening, she was seated next to Damianos and his brother at a meal. Damianos left to drink and to wrestle with some of his friends, and she smiled indulgently at him and let a servant refill her goblet. On her other side, Kastor was making conversation with the Veretian ambassador Guion about a possible trade arrangement. 

Jokaste turned in their direction and smiled politely. The conversation continued for a few minutes. Jokaste offered an opinion on the arrangement.

Guion looked sour. Kastor’s eyes turned toward Jokaste. Their eyes met for a long moment, and Kastor turned back to Guion. “The lady has a point.”

Jokaste could feel the interest in Kastor’s eyes from that evening. She was scrupulously careful, at first, to pay him no more attention than was appropriate for the brother of her lover. She was drawing the line more for Kastor and herself than for Damianos, who was oblivious. Kastor respected it, and engaged her in conversation at dinner or when they were seated together in one of the royal pavilions, but never made a point to seek her out alone.

She was not sure what marked the decline of Damianos’s interest. There was no one specific event--at least not that she was aware of--but she realized over the course of several weeks that he had invited her less often to his bed. It might have started with the First Night of one of the slaves that Damianos had been particularly taken with, lingering for several nights with the same slave and not even inviting Jokaste to join them. Or it might have been after that, when they had a dissatisfying evening together where Damianos was preoccupied with his father’s declining health and Jokaste with the fact that her monthly bleeding was late. 

She spent close to a week worrying that her courses were late, becoming almost convinced that she was with child. She thought a great deal of how she was going to tell Damianos. He might be upset, she knew, but he would come to love the child. He might offer marriage. He might not, though there would always be time for that later. 

Then her bleeding came, and she was a mix of relieved and disappointed. 

She felt overcome with regret for the fact that it had not been a child. She ceased her precautions. She wished that she had never taken them in the first place, that she had tried to conceive when Damen’s attentions were constant. She was beginning to feel desperate.

If it had been any other man--if she had been visiting Tassos at his home in Kesus--she would have left. There was no reason to overstay one’s welcome when a man’s attention was waning. Yet she stayed in Ios. Was it because he was a prince, and not just a man? She didn’t know and she no longer even believed things that she told herself. She was half lost in the fantasies in her head, the dreams of an elaborate wedding and a marriage that gave her a role in Akielon politics and her children on the throne. It didn’t matter if they found other interests after they were married, or if he occupied himself with his slaves. She wanted that place in the kingdom more than she wanted him specifically.

Except sometimes she wanted him specifically. Sometimes in the middle of a meal he would smile at her, and she forgot herself a little bit looking back at him. Sometimes when he stood beside her she could smell him and she wanted to just press against him or draw him to the bedroom and curl up next to him in the sheets.

She had never felt this way about anyone else. She had never known someone for such a short time and wanted so much, never allowed so many dreams about her own life and her own future to be so tied up in the idea of one man. She didn’t like it.

Damianos spent a night with her before he left on a short trip to visit Heston’s estates, but the timing was wrong, and he was away from Ios in the days she would have needed to conceive. It might not have worked even if he had been there during the days she thought, because by the time he returned from his trip, her bleeding had come again, but too early. 

She had heard women talk. That was how it began, sometimes, with the bleeding sometimes too long and sometimes too short, when a woman’s fertility began to fade. Her dream of the children--the boy and then the girl, the ones that she had already named in her head--seemed even further, and she hated Damianos for that as though it were his fault.

Damianos was also unhappy and distant upon his return. He was quarreling with his friend Nikandros, she knew, and it upset him, but he did not wish to speak of it. His father’s illness was progressing as well, and Damianos spent long hours in Theomedes’s sick room, but he did not wish to discuss that either. Seeing his father weakened sapped something in Damianos, and he wished for solitude on some evenings, and she simply smiled and pressed a hand against his arm comfortingly and said, “Of course.”

The summer came. The days seemed eternal. The sun rose early and stayed in the sky late into the evening. It was too hot in the middle of the day to do anything besides sleep, but the activity of the day was all in the morning or the evening, drills of the army and meetings of the kyroi and light meals where no fires were lit and they were served soft cheese and chilled wine. 

After one such evening, Jokaste stood out on one of the balconies overlooking the garden. It was the balcony where they had first kissed, several months before. It was strange to think that not so long before in her life, she had had none of the thoughts that occupied her now. She worried now about losing him, about losing all of the hopes she had pinned on him, and yet six months prior she had never even thought of having him. She had thought herself content to find someone like Tassos, and retire quietly. There had been nothing special about Tassos himself--if not him, than someone else like him. Someone who understood her well enough but didn’t want to know her intimately, where she could keep who she was to herself and yet be content when she rested her head on the pillow in the evening. She had thought children were a bother she didn’t need. 

Damianos was down in the garden with friends. They were drinking ale and playing a game with dice and laughing loudly. She watched. She didn’t think he knew that she was watching.

There was a noise from the door to the palace behind her. “Good evening.”

She turned. Kastor stepped out onto the balcony beside her. She looked at him. She took in the ways in which the two brothers were similar and the ways in which they were different. Kastor was calmer than Damen. He didn’t have the energy or the passion or the brilliance that Damianos displayed, but he listened. He understood that sometimes thirty-five had a wisdom that twenty-five did not. When she forgot herself at dinner and mentioned some event that had taken place fifteen years prior, Kastor knew what she was speaking of and agreed, while Damianos blinked and asked what they were referring to.

Kastor was standing respectfully a few feet from where she had positioned herself on the balcony. She took a step closer to him. “Good evening,” she said, and when he extended a hand toward her, she took it.


End file.
